(03-19-2020 08:09 PM)XLance Wrote:  

(03-19-2020 10:25 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(03-18-2020 09:00 PM)Statefan Wrote:  

(03-18-2020 08:34 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  There are also cultural reasons for those schools to want to be in the ACC - the self anointed snobbish gentility of Tobacco Road and the upper-South east of the Appalachians. But power is a big part of it too.

Quo, we prefer to call that a "Tidewater" thing.

Oh i get that. "Tidewater" is a cleaner brand name than ones that remind the northern schools the core ACC strives to identify with that ACC wealth was founded on slavery and tobacco.

Completely understandable.

By the early 1840's slavery was on life support in the upper south.
Once Andrew Jackson got the Indian Removal Act passed in 1830, which led to the Trail of Tears, there was a mass transfer of slaves out of the upper south into the areas where the Indians were removed from (Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi) because they were no longer needed in the "Tidewater".
It does not take an army of workers to prime and cure tobacco.

From Wiki, numbers from US Census data:

"By 1860, the number of slaves in the state of North Carolina was 331,059, about one third of the total population of the state. In 1860, there were nineteen counties in North Carolina where the number of slaves was larger than the free white population."

That's a fair number of slaves. And it also was a peak, i.e., in 1840, the slave population of NC was 245,000.

From the census map, it looks like slave populations in North Carolina and Virginia were heavily concentrated in the "Tidewater" area, the areas closest to the Atlantic and Chesapeake Bay. The western part of NC and the southwestern part of Virginia, the mountainous parts that border on Kentucky and Tennessee, much less so:

https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/1860_...bution.pdf